It is double the trouble if children are involved. But we are not complaining, still we soldier on; well most of us somehow still find the will and courage to go on. Not so with the rest. Last week, social media was abuzz with a story of a woman. This woman was allegedly caught shoplifting at some store in town. Nothing strange about that, theft happens every day; police even call it ‘theft common’. Shoplifters come in all shapes and forms too; male and female, old and young, poor and rich, educated and half baked, black and white; I can go on and on. Life doesn’t spare anyone. We see shoplifters every day, just yesterday I saw one (male) being bundled back into G West Choppies store. As they were forcefully pushing him back inside, I wondered whether the store employees were going to slap him senseless, marinate him with a mixture of water and flour or whether they were going to lock him up in the cold room until the store closed. Store keepers and their employees are notorious for that. They used to do that a lot when I was growing up, one time when I was at primary school we once waited for hours outside ‘Fairways’ supermarket for a schoolmate while he chilled in the cold room after stealing a packet of sweets. He had chosen the cold room over police. When he came out he was like a cold turkey, shivering and deathly quiet.
But this week’s alleged shoplifter caught everybody’s attention, not because a woman was involved but because apparently, the woman had on that day gone on a thieving expedition with her kid, whom she then ‘forgot’ when she fled. The story hasn’t been confirmed yet but even if this was just a figment of somebody’s imagination, it nonetheless brings to the fore the subject of single mothers and the struggles they go through every single day of their lives just to survive, their children included.
